Life in the Open Air

In this paper I reflect on the nature of our relationship with the atmosphere that surrounds us, by exploring the constituent parts of my title and the complex relations between them. I first look at ‘life’. How might the meaning of ‘what is life?’ depend on the context in which it is uttered? What does it mean to choose the boundary between the living and the non-living to interrogate? Are we asking after the current state of life or the very essence of ‘life itself’? I then look at the notion of being ‘in’. Drawing on Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas, Cornelius Castoriadis and Jesper Hoffmeyer, I suggest that to say that life is ‘in’ something is to invoke the constitutive relations between organism and environment. Then I turn to ‘air’, exploring the variegated meanings that make up the modern concept of ‘air’ and looking at a number of different ways we might say that ‘life is in the air’. The atmosphere can be seen as having its own kind of abiotic life, or life can be seen as carrying the signal of life – but life can also be said to be ‘in the air’ in a strong sense because of the metabolic relation between the inside and outside of the living body. Finally, I turn to ‘the open’, exploring the differing uses of this term by Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben and Tim Ingold. I conclude by arguing that the air contains not just the vital signs of life but also the signs of our technological disruption of the atmosphere, and that the reading of these signs can be a moment of responsibility for us.